Alexandra Bell
Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative, information consumption, and perception. Utilizing various media, she deconstructs dominant histories to highlight patterns in news reportage and society at large. Bell holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in Print Journalism from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.

NIC Kay
NIC Kay is from the Bronx. Currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history and spirituality. NIC Kay is currently a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.

Isabel Flower + Marcel Rosa-Salas
Isabel Flower and Marcel Rosa-Salas are friends living in New York City. Marcel is a PhD student in Anthropology at New York University who researches race and the American advertising industry. Isabel studied Art History and Studio Art at Princeton, and is an assistant editor at Artforum. Together they host Top Rank Magazine’s podcast and share a love for critical theory, ’90s R&B and Air Jordans.

YATTA
YATTA is a sierra-leonean american digipoet & performer who remixes shamanic sounds with her jazz vocals to create music to lie down in. a former Flux Factory resident, she currently works as the Operations Coordinator of the Silent Barn DIY Collective. Her work has been featured in Rookie Magazine, Dazed, Mask Magazine, and more.

About the curator:
MAMI is the collaborative curatorial initiative of Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze. Together, they organized MAMI, an exhibition and programming series at Knockdown Center in August of 2016. They’ve partnered with BALTI GURLS, BBZ London, Browntourage, POWRPLNT, Fake Accent, Holyrad Studio, Smart Girl Club, SISTER NYC, Top Rank Magazine and other womxn of color centered collectives to organize community gatherings that support our need to care for one another.

About Sunday Service
Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

Video Courtesy of Derek Schultz

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Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Niall Jones’ organized an evening that explored the dance party and nightlife, historically and empirically, as a commingling of multiple bodies and multiple ethics. The dance party ostensibly functions as a movement, at once, for and against the sturdiness of identity, and all the while irreducibly in pursuit of (un)certain pleasures and intractable notions of self. Invited participents were Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz, who shared work across mediums

Night, the persistence of virtuosic utterances, when language slips into dance, into moan.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves is an artist chiefly concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany working in the mediums of scholarship, corporeal wisdom, archival gesture and language. She lives and works in New York City where she is currently completing work on The Bulletin of Wilderness and Academy: an introductory conclusion to unschoolMFA forthcoming from Organic Electric Industries.

Effie Bowen
Effie Bowen graduated with a BFA in dance from Hollins University and has since performed work in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Upcoming projects include Transpacific at Northwestern University with Kentaro Kumanomido and DANCE SPORT, a solo at Gibney.

Angie Pittman
Angie Pittman is a dance artist, educator, and choreographer. Angie has had the pleasure of dancing in work by Ralph Lemon, Jennifer Lacey and Wally Cordona, Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, Johanna S. Meyer, Kyli Kleven, Anna Sperber, and others. Angie has performed her work at BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, and STooPS. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a graduate minor in African American Studies and a BA in Dance from Old Dominion University. She was a 2015 DanceWEB scholar for Impulstanz Dance Festival in Vienna, Austria and is a 2016 Artist-in-Residence with Movement Research. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how her body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power.

Raha
Raha is a performing artist, dancer and writer. She holds a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her interests lie at the intersections of urban politics, postcoloniality, critical dance studies and embodiment.

Manifestany Squirtz / Travis Steele Sisk
Manifestany Squirtz (aka Travis Steele Sisk) is a Brooklyn drag performance artist. Born out of condom wrapper on corner of Jefferson and Knickerbocker Ave, their sorted life as a performer has brought the masses gender-bending sex appeal and appalling stage behavior. A four time performer of Bushwig (Brooklyn’s annual non-gender conformist performance onslaught) and the former producer/host of RITUAL, a now deceased monthly queer cabaret.

About the Curator
Niall Jones is a dance artist and educator working in New York City and Philadelphia as a visiting professor in the Performance + Performance Studies graduate program at Pratt Institute and is Assistant Director for the School of Dance at the University of the Arts. Niall’s work collects between performance and visual art modalities; disorientation, pleasure, and materiality serve as conceptual access points related to structures of time and exhaustion and impermanence.

About Sunday Service
Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

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Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Co-curator Dana Kopel speaks about Formal Complaint, an exhibition on view at Knockdown Center April 15 – June 4, 2017.

Craft, scrap, and architectural minimalism coincide in Formal Complaint. Featuring work by Aria Dean, Female Background, Christopher Hanrahan, Mario Navarro, and Megan Pahmier, the exhibition returns handiwork to formalism, maintaining a sense of slackness. Metal armatures lean and bend precariously; a painting on unstretched canvas drags on the floor. Discarded materials and everyday objects come to conjure an upright but ‘bereft formalism’ (as Hanrahan calls it). Tenderness and despair coalesce in objects that can only just support themselves, much less make a claim for historical or philosophical significance. The works in the exhibition undermine past minimalisms from multiple directions—in terms of material, attitude, and dependence on context—but out of a care for and maintenance of form, rather than a casting off of it. Through these mergers of vernacular minimalism and sad design, work and supporting structure, Formal Complaint creates its own ecology of exhibitionary space.

Artist and FiveMyles Director Hanne Tierney speaks about her exhibition, Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas, at the Knockdown Center April 15 – May 28, 2017.

Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas is a self-performing object theater produced by artist Hanne Tierney. Installed across the expanse of Knockdown Center’s Annex, a series of vignettes come to life as cloth figures, hula hoops, and satin configurations gesture, twirl, and sway, manipulated by a system of motors and robotic electronics, designed by engineer Oskar Strautmanis. A soundtrack further animates each semi-abstract character, composed of a drifting narrative that stages imagined arguments between Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, woven with excerpts from Stein’s early plays, and with music by Erik Satie. Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas is played on a fifteen-minute loop during gallery hours, offering viewers the possibility of an ongoing encounter with the immersive, ambulatory experience of Tierney’s enchanting work.

Power Share/Power Surge: A Panel Discussion on Activism, Aging, Art, Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, Intersectional Feminisms, Sexuality, Trans Rights, and more. What can we do? Where do we connect? How can we share power?

This panel, curated by artist and activist Christen Clifford, came about through a consideration of feminism and asking whether there was a difference between identity politics and civil rights, and how we can come together to share our power. Clifford invited four artists and writers to connect, with the definition of “connect” in mind as “a link to a power supply.”

Christen Clifford is an activist, curator, feminist performance artist, mother and writer whose work includes the PussyBow . She teaches at The New School.

This event was part of STAY NASTY, a fundraising series of music, performances, and workshops that accompanied the NASTY WOMEN exhibition, January 12-15th, 2017.

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.